Electronic Resources: which are worth preserving what is their role in library collections? English version presented at the International Conference = Le risorse elettroniche: quali vale la pena di conservare e qual è il loro ruolo nelle raccolte della biblioteca? Versione italiana presentata alla Conferenza internazionale

摘要

Libraries across the world are spending increasing amounts of money on the acquisition of, and giving access to, electronic resources of all kinds. In addition, those libraries are devoting increasing amounts of human resources to advise and teach library users how to use electronic resources. The major issue facing libraries today is that of the preservation and onward transmission of the human record. This task has been accepted, usually tacitly, by many generations of librarians and archivists. The answer lies in some innovative and strong-minded research—in particular, we need an enumeration and taxonomy of the Web and the Internet. We could combat this electronic triumphalism by embarking on a serious enumeration and taxonomy of the Web and the Net that is aimed at identifying and isolating those documents and resources that are worth cataloguing and preserving. The starting point should be the grand idea of Universal Bibliographic Control, first put forward more than a quarter of century ago, in which individual libraries, regions, and countries cooperate to produce and share records without redundancy. Then there is the question of cataloguing and metadata. Metadata is an ill-considered attempt to find some kind of Third Way between the wilderness of search engines and free text searching and the grand architecture of bibliographic control that librarians have developed over the last 150 years.